UPDATED 14:53 EDT / OCTOBER 08 2010

IBM Stares Into The Future of Cloud and Storage – It’s About Storwize and Real Time Compression

As I prepare for the big Hadoop World conference in NYC (which IBM will not be participating at), I am reflecting on IBM’s storage event that they held yesterday in NYC.  Is IBM positioned for the future of the enterprise where the storage paradigm is the linchpin for cloud?

Hadoop World will feature presentations by organizations using Hadoop to solve real-world business problems. Apache Hadoop is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS).  Hadoop is about the future of cloud and storage.  The top firms are using Hadoop in their enterprises and I’m hearing that there will be tons of news and announcements.  Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other leading enterprises will be there.  Cloudera is the company leading the way in this new movement.  They have the braintrust who see the future.

IBM’s future is getting set by their management.  Yesterday IBM gave us a glimpse of their storage (or cloud) future.  At the Plaze Hotel IBM invited the industry’s top analysts to a briefing of their storage plans.  The IBM top management unveiled the new direction for IBM.  It was a direction of efficiency and data management.   The reaction from the analyst was one of new mangement putting together a plan to roll out new products and solutions.

Many have been saying privately that IBM management have been the proverbial deer in the headlights when it came to the future.  I then it became clear.  IBM’s future is about Storwize.

IBM basically announced that they were taking the Storwize technology and integrating it across their products and taking the Storwize name and brand and using it for their new platform (which isn’t really at all like the old Storwize).  The aha moment for me was the notion that Real Time Compression is the heart of what IBM is betting on.  IBM acquired Storwize for a song and are taking their technology and brand and making them the centerpiece of their strategy.

This is IBM’s future strategy compete with a bunch of small but important acquisitions and integrate them into their portfolio.  Real Time Compression is an important technology for the cloud and the future of converged infrastructure.  This ties directly into to key themes in the emerging enterprise “cloud” storage market:  efficiency and data management.

IBM’s real time compression (the old Storwize) has an architecture called RACE– Random Access Compression Engine which provides real time (in-line), lossless data compression explicitly designed for primary storage applications. Customers are seeing compression rates of between 50-90% and IBM has sampling statistics that corroborate these data points. The other thing that is notable is proof points that IBM has developed validating the fact that Storwize compression doesn’t degrade performance. When you dig into the real time compression data you can see that it actually increases performance.

The reason is pretty interesting actually. IBM’s real time compression compressess data on an initial write and as a result, the cache in the disk array controller is effectively enlarged, meaning more data will be serviced out of cache. This increases cache hits and minimizes cache de-staging to backend disk; thereby increasing performance.

I ran into this IBM viral video where they goof on the Facebook trailer for the Social Network movie to highlight their value proposition.  I tweeted it earlier today.  Check it out.

@furrier: watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB95KLmpLR4 then this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li8syQ82MLk #ibmstorage

The Social Network Movie Trailer

The Storage Network Movie Trailer by IBM

IBM hopes to have a presence in the emerging “private cloud” data game.


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